Podcast Transcript
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
As I thought about what we were doing and I’d given you that little, why don’t we try this, this, and this, I realized that, the four facets framework that I work within and it’s become my model for all my coaching was probably a good, good place to start. And, and what that says, it.
**Josh Nichols**
Love that.
**Josh Nichols**
Love that.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, okay.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
It started off as a way of trying to capture all the dimensions of human evolution. This comes from the integral world, which is a post-postmodern philosophy of trying to understand the world. And as I worked with it and tweaked one of the facets, one of the quadrants, it became a model for me deconstructing a person’s worldview or way they experience the world. So as a clinician and a coach, I’m always looking for the points at which someone’s misalignment with reality is causing suffering. And that suffering can manifest very differently for a golfer. It’s going to be, I’m not getting the scores I want for a spiritually inclined person. I’m not getting to the depths of meditation that I want.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
for an entrepreneur who I also work with, I’m not getting the results in my income stream that I want. And initially my emphasis was on the bio-remotive framework, which is a new way of seeing the emotional system and how it works. And it brings way more resolution phenomenally to what’s going on with people and how to process that essentially unconscious part of our existence. And so if…
I have a statistics background. And if you think about it as, you know, any model that we have of reality captures X amount of variance. If you have a good model, you’re capturing 90, 95 % of the variance of whatever you’re interested in. If you’ve got a bad model, you’re capturing 15 to 20%. And that’s where most social sciences are at, 15, 20, 30%. I would say that, you know, with my bi-remotive model,
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm, I didn’t that.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
and the cognitive behavioral kind of rational stuff that I was taught, I was getting 40 to 60 % of the variance of somebody’s suffering or worldview and could help them with it. When I added developmental models and some other integral stuff, I would say I started getting 80, 90 % of a person’s world. And as I did that, I realized that I could tweak this into a model for understanding our ego and how we create reality. Now, I know this sounds abstract, but like when you’re out on the golf course and you’re hitting a golf ball and you’re getting frustrated, that’s your reality. You’ve created that, right? It’s based on the world you’re living in. Someone else can be having the same missed shot and they’re happy as hell and just like bubbling away, right? So we all live in different worlds and the four facets,
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
as I’ve come to name them, the first one is the kind of waking up dimension, which is like, what are you identified with? What are you so lost in that you can’t see? And this is basically where mindfulness practices and meditation practices sort of fit into the world. It’s to help you disidentify from whatever it is is causing you suffering.
**Josh Nichols**
touch.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
The other dimension, the other facet is the cleaning up facet. So waking up and cleaning up. Cleaning up means to get rid of the distortions that you have from your personal history that are causing you to not see the reality you’re living in properly, which is causing you suffering, right? And that cleaning up is largely emotional because we don’t have too many people with really divergent mental views. So if someone believes they’re living on a flat earth, you know, it’s not going to meet reality properly when you’re flying in a plane, right? So you’ll cause some suffering and maybe, you you’re thinking you’re going to fly into a wall, but you won’t, right? So you have to get your understanding of the world kind of cleaned up so that you’re kind of mapping on as nicely as you can. Get rid of your personal distortions.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
The third facet is what is normally called a growing up model. And the part I don’t like about it is it implies a hierarchy. And while it’s true, you know, there’s lower platforms that you have to build on. Ideally, what you’re doing is building a more elaborate home that has more options for you to go and live in and experience the world. Right. And sometimes it’s not good to live in the highest part of your house all the time. You need to live in some of the lower dimensions, but ideally the person who has the most possible worlds to live in will have the most flexible and adaptable response to the world they’re living in. Now the fourth, so we’ve got waking up, cleaning up, growing up. Now this is pretty much what integral theory has talked about with Ken Wilber.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
We differ on the fourth facet. He says the fourth facet of sort of human development and transformation is showing up, to show up in the world and bring who you are to that space. But I actually see that as part of the developmental stages. The fourth facet that works really well for me clinically and as a coach is the looking around dimension. And that means which parts of reality are you not seeing that are influencing your world. So for example, if you’re insensitive to nonverbal cues, you can’t process them. It means you’re going to have all sorts of really weird interactions with people, right? So you need to be able to see what’s out there in order to process it. So these four facets are actually how our ego comes into existence.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So whatever you can see and process will be turned into the first structures of reality based on the worldview that you’re living in, which will then some of those objects and relationships will be emphasized depending on your emotional history conditioning. And that’s basically created the world. You’re creating reality. And then the last piece, the waking up piece is which part of that do you believe is you in which part is the world? So, you know, in a non-abstract term, if you’re in a, if you have something going on on the golf course and you’re very sensitive to the fact that someone’s muttering or speaking behind you while you’re playing, someone else might not pick that up at all, but you’re picking that up and you’re say a traditionalist, a traditional person you know, where you’ve got this sense that people should be following the rules and respecting authority and keep the game intact and they shouldn’t be wearing those kinds of clothing. If you’ve got that, you’re going to have an anger response, right? And maybe part of it is because you were disrespected, you know, as a teenager and no one was there to protect you, right? And so you get really angry with what’s going on. Now, if you are identified with that anger, You’re just going to have a tantrum. You might throw down your club and lose it and, know, swear at somebody. But if you’re disidentified with it, you’ll go, I’m getting angry. I have to remember to talk to the officials about this afterwards. So that simple distancing. I’m seeing the anger as opposed to being the anger is that sort of what are you identified with? Right. So that model, what are you perceiving? What’s the developmental structures, the worldview that you’re parsing it through, which parts are you adding valence to, additional meaning based on your history, and then which parts are you and which parts are the world. That model basically, any intervention in the mental health game, the mental game of golf, is gonna fit into trying to work with one of those four parameters.
**Josh Nichols**
So is it… is that a… are they kind of four things that are kind of existing on the same plane, or are they a structure that goes from kind of base level up to highest level? Is it… is it a… do they build on each other, or are they all kind of parallel?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
They’re, the word in statistics is they’re orthogonal, which means they’re independent and cross, they’re not correlated at all. And so they’re all four separate dimensions. You can be really high on one and really low on the others. And in fact, when I’m working with spiritual people, it’s true that I can say if you’re high on any one of these four facets,
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You can be mistaken for a spiritual person.
**Josh Nichols**
yeah, that’s interesting.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You know, because if you’re really good at the fourth facet of looking around, you might have psychic capacities or be able to like do things or reach jaunic states, know, like access parts of consciousness that most people can’t. And you might be, you know, tribal in your developmental stage and see everyone as the enemy in competition. know, and so is, is if you’re just high on one, almost certainly you’re going to end up having problems. A balanced life starts when you start getting relatively high on each of the facets, you know, and then life’s a little smoother.
**Josh Nichols**
Okay.
**Josh Nichols**
So the ideal is you’re as high as possible on all of these because the lower you are on each these facets, the more suffering you’re going to experience.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Exactly. Yeah. Though, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s in general, that’s true.
**Josh Nichols**
You got it. And you got to remember I’m a, not a, maybe a dummy is too strong of a word to, I need to give myself more credit than that, but I’m a brand new to this exact topic. The ideas of, you know, disidentifying, detaching from your emotions, being able to see your emotions as observant and neutral and curious, being curious about them. That’s not new to me. And the idea of… being able to, let’s see, the different worldviews that you see the game of golf through, right, and how your childhood resulted in how you’re experiencing the game of golf now. None of these are kind of new to me, but the fact that there’s like, okay, everyone’s suffering or ego… is, and everyone’s experience on the golf course is filtered through this kind of, you’re probably out of balance or low on multiple.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yes, right. And see, this is what’s cool is that, like I said, I think every intervention in the field of golf for the mental health game and for golf psychology is going to be coming from one of these four facets. And so this is what’s called a meta framework. It organizes all the different ways of looking at things and places them in these categories. And then once you’ve got that, it becomes a diagnostic thing. When I talk to someone, I ask a few questions about, you know, what’s going on in the golf course. And, you know, it’s not long before I go, okay, they’re sitting in this kind of worldview. And I can hear that they’ve got this conditioning from childhood and they’re still identified or actually they’ve, they’ve got this conditioning, but they’ve done a lot of work with disidentification, but disidentification doesn’t eliminate the conditioning. It takes a long time for that to wear out, right? And so mindfulness will often give you a freedom from a process that’s hurting you, but it doesn’t give you freedom from the process. The process is still in your system. And that’s where I go to the emotional clearing work. The other part that I’ve been looking at in that fourth facet comes from my meditative background, the looking around part.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You know, I worked, part of my small little claim to fame in the podcast world was that I worked with a man named Chulidasa, Chulidasa John Yates, who wrote a book called The Mind Illuminated, which for many people, particularly very rational, modern people, it’s the Bible for learning how to meditate. It gives you very detailed descriptions of what to expect at each stage and what you need to do at each stage.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And so he was a master of meditation, like literally a fourth arhat, fourth path arhat, you know, from what we can tell. And yet he was still suffering. And when I worked with him and I taught him this lower emotional clearing place. His life changed radically. Estrangement from his family, you know, overcame that, started emotionally expressing himself and connecting and saying things he’d never done, cleared his history, got rid of distortions, and his quality of life before he ended, because he was quite old, radically improved.
**Josh Nichols**
No kidding.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Which is something to say, like he’s been meditating for 50 years and was as high as you could get on the disidentification stage, right? But he was oblivious to some of the emotional things, didn’t have the tools. And the thing about his skill level was that when I worked with him, he moved through this emotional material probably five, six, seven times faster than most people would, because he wasn’t identified with any of it, right? And so that background in my… because I’ve been meditating for 40 plus years, which allows me to meet people like that. I’m now experimenting with some of those principles from Deep Vipassana with golf. So I was playing with some buddies yesterday and normally I’ve been playing quite well. I think I mentioned the group that I’ve dropped my handicap by six points in the last month. It’s still erratic, but playing with my buddies from high school stimulated shit. you know, triggered me a little bit that I wasn’t aware of. And, you know, it’s like, wow, okay, I’m still getting triggered by this. I need to clear some of this because it affected my game. I shot on the high side of my handicap. No, I shot in 87, whereas normally I’ve been shooting in the low eighties. And one of the things that I’ll just sort of bring out for intrigue is as I was on my backswing, they’ll sometimes just say things to get in your head, right? This is not a respectful stuff. It’s like they’re, they’re, they’re screwing around with you.
**Josh Nichols**
Stop.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And I noticed that I would shift out of an expansive awareness mode into an attentional mode. And as soon as I did that, I lost feedback from my body that I’ve been using to enhance my game, right? So that fourth facet is where I’ve been playing with, you know, how can I bring metacognitive awareness and metacognitive structures to give me more mind moments in my swing so that I can actually process the experience of that swing.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
and allow my physical body to learn more from each time that I hit or miss hit it. And most of this stuff is happening unconsciously for people. And I’m trying to bring these explicit frameworks to make it something more directly and explicitly accessible to people. And I’m my trial. Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah, right. N of one for now. So the, you know, I’ve got a lot of… I say a lot compared to you. Very, very minimal. But I’ve got a large chunk of my life now has been spent talking to, like, a counselor therapist person. And I never know what to call them. I don’t think they’re a licensed therapist. I think they’re simply a counselor. Right? It’s been two different people. man and a woman, but they… most of that time has been spent kind of digging up childhood stuff, and that seems to be both of their go-to, or both of their… who they learned from taught them this is the… this is where you got to go first, right? Everything comes from childhood. So… so then I’m… you know, I’m… I’m left with… How is, and it’s rare that I bring these things to golf, mostly because I just don’t play as much golf as I used to. I wish I had this experience when I was playing more golf. I wish I had these processing skills. when I, you know, I guess simply put, what does my childhood have to do with how I play golf? does, like the fact that I just snap hooked a tee shot out of bounds, what? How does my childhood come into that and the other, maybe the other three facets?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. So. Here’s an example. I’m playing with an old friend of mine at Hekla, which is a beautiful kind of resort up north in the Interlake. And he’s a professional, very well respected, and he plays golf fairly well, but he only plays golf casually. And he was having trouble with his game. And I said, Hey, do you want to try a little bit of bio-emotive processing and see what it does? He says, sure. And I said, so how are you feeling as you hit this? he, cause I, cause he’s miss hit a couple. And I said, so how do you feel about miss hitting that? And he says, well, I feel bad about it. Like I, I’m embarrassed and I go, okay. So to me, embarrassed is an interpersonal feeling, but it’s not the end. You’ve to keep going. So I said, so what, what are you embarrassed about? says, well, I should be better than this. should be good. And it’s like, okay. And that’s a rational kind of take on things. And I said, so what’s the feeling underneath there. And he goes, I don’t know the feeling. I just feel bad. And I said, well, try some of these nine core feelings out because that’s a different story. And I go through you feeling worthless, you feeling insignificant. I’m feeling inadequate. He goes, yeah, I feel inadequate. And I said, well, OK, why don’t you just hang out with feeling inadequate? Make it OK to just feel inadequate. He says, no, I hate that. I don’t like that feeling. you know, basically, he’s saying, I’m a professional. I’ve got all these skills, I should be good at things. And it’s like, yeah, but you’re golfing right now, right? Golf is the great humbler. And so I said, just make it okay to feel the inadequacy. And I want you to tell me, Doug, I feel inadequate. I believe I should be playing much better right now. And as he did it, he kind of teared up a little bit and he relaxed. And he went, man, that just feels good to say.
**Josh Nichols**
Ha ha ha. my gosh.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So I said, okay, so why don’t you just be inadequate, accept that you’re feeling inadequate and hit your next shot. And he goes and hits it and it’s a perfect smack middle of the thing. Perfect draw, know, his pitching went, it goes like 135 yards onto the green and he goes, whoa, right? Now two things happened is I got rid of the tension between how he was feeling and how he wanted to feel, which means he got brought into the present, right? And in doing so, We basically disidentified from it. He could just say, OK, I’m feeling inadequate, but I’m not really inadequate. It’s just a feeling I’m having right now. So he became present and aligned, his body relaxed, and his game took off. Now, if he was somebody who was feeling inadequate all the time, which he probably would under these circumstances, then we would go and say, well, let’s deal with this child. Where is this inadequacy coming?
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You know, what’s going on? And so I never start with the childhood. I just say, let’s hang out with, I feel inadequate. I believe I should be playing better than this. And as you hang out in that energetic space, inevitably past memories and associations start coming up. And it’s like, I remember being in high school and I messed up on my, you know, speech I was doing in front of the class and everyone laughed and, know, and you can’t cry in high school. Right. So you just. jam the feelings down and go on, but then any intense interpersonal encounter that you don’t fully experience and express becomes part of your worldview or sense of self instead of something that happened to you.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So that is a definition that describes the human condition. And when it gets high enough is a definition of trauma. So when you’ve got really bad, horrific interpersonal encounters that you haven’t fully experienced and expressed, you get capital T trauma. But when you get little embarrassing interpersonal encounters that you don’t fully experience and express, you get little T trauma. Both of them are carried with you and both of them will get triggered.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
under, they make you sensitize to that particular feeling dimension in the future. And then you keep replaying and read. So I’m noticing you.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm. Right. Confirming it and saying, there it is again. Yep. I’m inadequate. Yep. And you’re not even noticing that you’re doing.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right. Exactly. you know, the way the way we work, we either pick partners or friendships that treat us the way we feel we should be treated. Or we teach people to treat us that way. So if you feel worthless, you’re going to treat teach people to treat you like you’re worthless because you’re not going to stand up for yourself or you’re going to pick people who are a little bit abusive. Right now.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I, I, I would make the regress to clinical context, but the same thing’s going to happen in golf, right? Who you play with and the kinds of people that you hang out with, you know, are determined largely by how you feel comfortable being, being, related to. And hopefully most of us have good company, but some of us are hanging out in dysfunctional golfing relationships too. You know? I.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. And, and the relationship with golf itself, right? so how much of it is, you know, let’s say, let’s take playing partners out of it and interpersonal relationships out of it, but, let’s just hone in on your relationship with the game itself. How can, you know, let’s stay on the inadequacy one. How can I feel inadequate equal treating, you know, treating teaching golf to treat me as inadequate. Is that the, do you see that dynamic happen?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
That’s a new way of looking at it. So give me a second. Let’s just say if you’re driven by feelings of inadequacy, it may mean that you compulsively get up every day at 5 30 and do your workout schedule and do this and make sure you practice that and you’re constantly watching and you’re probably going to overdo your discipline’s structure. because you’re compulsively driven to try and feel adequate. Right? And so you’re not in a state of balance or harmony there and you’re more likely to hurt yourself or exhaust yourself or burn yourself out. Same thing with insignificance. Same. So if you’re going to golf, trying to fill emotional holes, it’s a never ending quest. It’s that, you know, who is that guy that rolls the mountain up?
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
the boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down.
**Josh Nichols**
man, Sisyphus maybe? Something? I don’t know.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
could be Sisyphus, you know, so what I say is if you’ve got emotional holes in your system and you’re trying to fill them with behavioral experiences, it’s a never ending infinite well. You can dump all the possible wins and positive experiences into it, but if you don’t process the emotional stuff, you’re just going to be compulsively moving forward trying to fill the hole. So I see this say with entrepreneurs who feel insignificant and they do something where they get all this attention, you know, maybe they get on some podcasts or something and they get this hint and they feel seen and recognized and valued and significant. And it’s like, all right. And they, you know, they get that hit and they feel good. But then as soon as a podcast is over, the insignificance creeps back in. And so they go, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go and do this and get that right.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
It’s not a good motivational approach to golf or anything, to be trying to fill our emotional holes. this is, you spoke about Scottie Scheffler’s interview, and it actually illustrates some really beautiful points that come up in this four facets thing. So Scottie Scheffler kind of blew everyone away by saying, golf doesn’t mean that much to
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right? Now there’s an example of someone who’s not trying to fill emotional holes with victories and values and appreciation from the outside. So it tells me that he’s clearly done a lot of emotional clearing work. It also gave me a good look at his sort of worldviews, right? He’s seeing golf as a kind of job, something I get up and do. because it brings in money so that I can look after my family. And so his core worldview with his embrace of family and religion and being a father and sort of fulfilling those roles, it’s a beautiful, very healthy, traditional, you know, look at the world. I am the provider. I have to bring in money. I love my wife and my children. We’re working together. That’s what’s important to me. That’s a very different value system than the one next door to that, which is an orange individualistic all about me. Who am I? How great can I be? Where do I rank against everybody else? That modern achiever mentality is you’re trying to measure your mental metal against other people. Now he’s probably solidified where he is with this equanimity because he’s reached the top. He goes, okay, it worked. I got to be the best in the world. There’s nothing else here for me. And that’s a developmental step that happens in all sorts of worlds where you go off to see if you can be a great entrepreneur or how well you can do in the business world or how well you can be as a guitar player. And you reach your kind of
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, it worked.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
level of competency. And for 99 % of us, it’s a very humbling experience. You know, but you have to go through that stage of figuring out I was the best in high school, then I was the best in university, then I got my ass kicked in Q-School. Right? That’s a humbling experience. And it’s like, well, is there still room for me to grow? Can I work on the mental game? Can I work on my body?
**Josh Nichols**
Mm-hmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You know, and then you have to decide like how committed you want to get because your natural capacities are kind of failing you. You’ve risen to the cream of the crop that you are. And there’s all still 3000 people in the world better than you are 5000, whatever it is. And so that, you know, when you, when you reach that kind of either the top or you understand where you are in the hierarchy of achievement, you have to shift your worldview.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You have to go, well, what’s meaningful because I’m not going to be the best guitar player in the world. I’m not going to be the whatever. And so that leads to a kind of crisis and you have to redefine who you are based on another worldview. The one that’s usually taken is a postmodern quality of relationship. I’m going to go out and enjoy this game, hang out with my buddies. You know, there’s still, we’re still elite players. And we’re having a different experience than the casual golfers, but it’s still just about the quality of relationship and how much I enjoy the game of golf while I’m out there. Maybe I can make some money, but I get that it’s no longer going to be my quest. I’m here to enjoy life. Right. So this happened early for me when I was going through academia, I excelled in academia. was a statistician, researcher, programmer, you know, and I did some very innovative. stuff that no one had done. And without anyone talking to me, my professors had sent me up to go to interviews at Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia and UCLA. And I said, I have no interest in doing that. Like, I’m not, I don’t want that life or lifestyle. Read, you know, look at my application and I pulled it out and I said, upon graduating with my PhD, I’ll be returning back to Manitoba. to raise my four children amongst my extended family. I watched people burn out with the, I’m going to excel in academia. And it’s like, I’m just going to enjoy academia. And my real quality of life comes from the relationship with my kids and my extended family and being there. It seems traditional, but it’s not because I’ve got the option. I’m not just embedded in that world of family and clan.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I have the option and I value it and I want deeper meaningful relationships there. Right? So my kids, you know, they’ll say like, you know, at certain points in their life, they were like, you’re like my best friend because right now nobody else understands me. Right? And then my job, because they’ve developed certain complexities growing up with two therapists and spiritual meditators. And so our job was to help them find other people that
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
they could relate to and find their own, you know, extended world of people and relationships that, you know, they can move out to because, you know, we’re going to be dead in a little while and they’re going to keep living. Right. So, you know, that that postmodern quality of life is really important. The the other thing that happens that I’m going to talk about in worldviews and this is all spiral dynamics. We’re skipping the first two or three stages and talk about traditional modern and, you know, and again. I see them less as like you should be higher and more about what fits for the world that you’re living in. Because if you’re a postmodern living in a traditional world or a traditional person living in a postmodern world, you’re going to be suffering, right? And you don’t want that. So it’s like, these are just optional places for us to experience the world based on the conditions that we’re living in.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And ideally you want fluidity to move to the different worldviews without being identified with them. There is a second tier to developmental stuff that it’s usually called teal and turquoise, but in my world, I see the second tier is characterized by pattern recognition. And this is very relevant to golf. So you asked about how does
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
feeling inadequate or my childhood affect me in golf? when I’m sitting, so the first stage of second tier is pattern recognition for deconstruction, where the accidental ego structures that I built based on my random environment and conditioning, I get to start playing with, clearing with, and creating my own ego structure that’s alignment with my. values and that’s the personal growth journey that a lot of people go on where they break away from their conditioning and they want to get past the habits and the dysfunctions and come into alignment with the values that they think are important. And so when I go to golf, you know, there’s two pieces that come up. I grew up in a very traditional fundamentalist kind of Christian context. so I Everyone, I was always feeling watched. God was watching me, you know, and I had to report on sins, whether I was sinning or not, like, you know, confession and everything. So I found that when I would get behind the golf ball and start pulling my hands back in the backswing, my focus would pop over to who’s watching me and what are they going to think and how are they going to evaluate? I
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Wow.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Am I swinging properly? I standing? You know, and I lost my center of gravity because of that traditional view. And I’m stuck there because I had some like emotional trauma around not living up to expectations, right? And being a bad kid. So I had to start working on that thing in my golf because it was very disruptive to lose my center.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
As soon as I imagined people watching me. Right. And so as I worked with that, I found that I was able to focus on the ball, not shift where I felt I was located and experience the swing and hit the thing much more fully. Right. So that kind of deconstructive thing where as I’m playing golf and I go, why am I responding with this emotional intensity to this experience?
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
It’s coming back from my conditioning. And so I’ve been using golf to access conditioning that hasn’t been triggered in the rest of my life and do the processing and kind of clear myself. And it’s leaving me more and more present and more, more net more in a state of equanimity and awareness, you know, as I’m hitting the ball. there is by clearing that history, I’m moving into that state of mindful awareness.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
without any effort, right? And one of the things about the mind illuminated in that book was as it teaches meditation, the first seven stages are all about getting the intellect under control so that it starts darting around and focus. You want to focus here and the intellect’s going over here and then you’ll get lost and you’ll come back, right?
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
The first seven stages are about learning to get the intellect, you know, focused on what you want. And then something remarkable happens when you master stage seven. Poof. There’s no more jittering. There’s no more. It’s trying to, it literally just rests on the object. And now you have effortless attention. And with that effortless attention, you can expand into a state of effortless awareness. And suddenly all of these.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
mind dynamics that you weren’t capable of perceiving come into awareness and you start moving into Jhanic states and bliss states and Vipassana states and there’s a whole aspect of mental activity that you cannot know while you’re still working with trying to get the intellect under control because it’s like a wild animal that doesn’t want to sit where you want it to sit and this struggle.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I was gonna, right. And I was gonna ask you, how do you know that you’re suffering? How do you know that when the feeling of being watched is suffering and should you… Cause there’s, there’s this like, meta acceptance where, you know, the, the fact that you think the fact that you feel watched and you feel judged and you feel wrong is something you want to change, but you’re, you’re not accepting it as their, yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yes.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Well, see, a first facet intervention, disidentification, would allow me to just go, this is my childhood conditioning playing out and not add any extra energy to it. But I’m still feeling the gap between where I want to be centered and where my system is pulling. So I can be mindful of that, but it’s still causing an imbalance and it’s still causing me to not hit the ball.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure. Sure.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I’m fighting extra factors now to hit the ball smoothly. And so you go down to the, you know, emotional clearing thing, work out that maybe do something to shift your developmental stage out of being so concerned about being seen by the outside world. You know, am I playing the role properly? And in fact, I think you just interviewed, is it Whitman?
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Waldron. Jim Waldron. Is probably who you’re referring to. Maybe?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Waldron. Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
He’s talking about rites of passage and he talked a lot about the yips.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
What was I just talking about? Because he said something that was relevant there.
**Josh Nichols**
Kind of processing your Childhood and then moving up I’m I’m This all of this is beyond my current Understanding. This is very this very deep Topic which I am in love with so it’s I’m learning this on the go. You’ve been thinking about this stuff all the time. So when you say, did I, what was I just talking about there? I’m like, I don’t know. What were you just talking about there? So, sure, sure.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. It’ll probably come back up. Yeah. so yeah, we’re going back to that theme of, I’m using the first, the first stage of second tier is to use the pattern recognition. So I’m seeing patterns and I’m deconstructing myself and my ego to create something that I want. I’m consciously clearing the accidental conditioning and looking at what world view I’m stuck in so that I can move to a place of more freedom. So that’s the first stage of second tier.
**Josh Nichols**
So, right, before we move on for that, that brings up an idea. So how do you know what… you you talked about the difference between where you are and where you want to be, and where you are is you’re kind of trapped in this unaware suffering, and where you want to be is this freedom, peace, equanimity, that kind of thing. So do you know what you want is suffering? So I’ll just take myself for example, and this can be golf related. The first thing that comes to mind for me is kind of running my business. So I want to be really successful with my business. I want to, you know, earn enough money for us to be comfortable and that kind of thing. So I want to work hard. My natural inclination is to work hard, but I I find, yeah, it’s an awesome natural inclination. I’m glad it’s not the opposite of where I feel lazy all the time. I’m inclined to do it. But I also feel like I’m over trying, over trying to overachieve and trying to overcome an inadequacy. there’s within what I want is also, but are you sure what you want is, is healthy and serving you and I the same thing to go for golf where I have this strong passion and desire to get back to where I was before so that that’s language maybe already a red flag of language right there but you know I I made it to the finals of the US Mid-Am and I desperately want to get back to that and it’s a on the one hand it’s a really it’s an inspiring good exciting mission that I’m trying to be on. But on the other hand, it’s also introducing all sorts of suffering where I am comparing myself to someone that I’m not a quote unquote that I’m not anymore. And maybe just the fact that I see myself as two different people is a version of suffering, right? I’m still that same Josh, Josh, Josh then and Josh now are still the same person. So what I what what I want and where I want to be is good and bad at the same time. So how can you reconcile that?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So, so what I’m hearing is that you have a vision for your golf game and for your podcast that inspires you and gets you out of bed in the morning. That’s what a vision is supposed to do. Okay. Some people don’t have that. They’re, they’re aimless. They’re wandering around. They’re lost, right? The opposite of having a vision with purpose is to feel lost. You have a vision, you get out of bed in the morning.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes.
**Josh Nichols**
I see.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
with motivation and that’s awesome. Now if you find yourself overworking or overly concerned about X or Y or Z then you have to look for what’s my emotional conditioning doing? How is it driving me? Because if it’s driving you it means you’re blind or compelled in some way and that’s going to cause suffering.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, compulsion. Yeah. Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right? Anytime we have that kind of thing, you can, you can harness compulsions, but eventually you’re going to suffer from them. Freud actually called that sublimation, right? Most of society is driven by sublimation. People’s compulsions to do things not coming from the best place, but we still get a really cool society out of it. But the individuals burnout, right? You want to have a vision that sustains you. So when you say, I want to get back.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
to what I used to be. If there’s a deep feeling of loss or regret that you’re, you you made a mistake somewhere along the way and you’ve fallen from grace, then you’ve got some issues to work through. I’m 65 and I want to see if I can play as well as 35 year olds. But it’s just a game to me. It’s an experiment. It’s like, well, I’m healthier than most people.
**Josh Nichols**
I do.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I can still hit the ball on a good day, 270 to 300, I hit it. My average drive is 230, but I’m still working on my swing. I don’t have it ingrained yet, so I can’t focus on power. But I’m just intrigued with what can a healthy 65 year old do and how well can get, because I only started playing golf 15, 20 years ago, like late, and I didn’t start taking it seriously until a few years ago. So I’m intrigued.
**Josh Nichols**
No kidding.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Because what else is there to do at a certain point, right? I’ve got my income, I’ve had my family. It’s like there’s just things you need to do to play and engage in the world that’s satisfying. And so this is one of those things. I’ve got to now update my blog that all the people I’ve worked with for five, 10 years that they know me as like the spiritual mentor or the psychological guru or the whatever. I’m gonna say, hey, I’m taking up golf and I’m gonna be writing about it. And some of them are going, my God, golf? I can’t relate to him. He’s gone over to the dark side or something, you know, because that’s not spiritual enough. And yet in my mind, you know, spirituality is just a relationship to life, right? And almost everything we call spirituality is just leading edge understanding of consciousness, you know, and what the human potential is all about, right? And that’s what I’m intrigued.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure. I’m sorry.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Josh Nichols**
Right. Yeah, and that, you know, I do, I do have this, relationship, probably unhealthy relationship with guilt or regret or you know, like you said, I quote unquote fell from grace. So when I when I say I want to get back to where I was, it’s it is like I was up here and now I’m way down here as if where I am is not okay anymore. So that that leads to constant, you know, everything that prevents me from practicing or playing or getting out, including like conversation like good things like my two-year-old son and my wife and amazing things. Those things I meet with anger because they’re blocking me from getting what I want. So now I’m suffering constantly because of my relationship with my past.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Interesting. So, you know, we could explore this a little bit and I could, you know, I’m going to take a guess and I, you know, there’s a process that I use that I call, basically, non-linear or non-intellectual thinking. It’s, it’s, it’s emotions based problem solving. And if you get there by hanging out in the emotional brain and the emotional brains works through association and imagery. And so you have to get something that invokes energy. So I look around for a feeling that relates to this fall from grace. And it might start off with like, I feel like a failure. So if you say the words, I feel like a failure, how much truth, truthiness or feeling of resonance do you get? If you say it out loud, I feel like a failure.
**Josh Nichols**
Mm-hmm.
**Josh Nichols**
I feel like a failure. That one doesn’t, that one, I don’t think that one quite resonates. I don’t think that one quite hits, the nail on the head.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Okay, so what resonates a little closer to this fall from grace?
**Josh Nichols**
I feel regret. Is that on the same plane of feeling that we’re describing here?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah, so let’s hang out with regret. I regret what? I regret.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I regret not continuing playing golf at the same intensity that I was back then that got me so good at golf. I put the clubs away for a while. I replaced the priorities, again, with great things, but I have a regret that I didn’t maintain a competency.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So I’m going to take a couple jumps here and I want you to try this. And again, if it’s an offering, if it doesn’t work, just like the first one, we’ll find another one. I regret not living up to my full potential.
**Josh Nichols**
Bring it.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I regret not living up to my full potential in golf. That one doesn’t hit because I feel like my potentialist could still be ahead of me. So I feel like there’s still an opportunity for me to live up to.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I regret quitting golf the way I did. Something like that.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I regret quitting golf the way I did. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Now, does that bring up a little bit of emotional activation? I regret quitting golf the way I
**Josh Nichols**
It does. You know, I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve kind of got some goosebumps, chills, because I, you know, I think back and, in fairness in, a disclaimer would be I’ve done, I’ve thought about this a million times. Sorry. I have a podcast where I talk about this all the time. I have clients where I, I relate to them using this all the time. So I, and like I mentioned, I’ve gone to a counselor for years where this has been a regular part of our conversation. So. I’m more… I’ve processed this a lot, but still to this day, yeah, I regret quitting golf the way that I did. Absolutely. the feeling is disappointment in myself. Like I let myself down. Like future Josh let current Josh at the time down. Or no, no, no, current Josh at the time let future Josh down, right?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. one of the things about feelings is they’re very simple and that kind of explanation thing, it works to flesh out the details, but like with feelings. you you can say things like, I’m disappointed in myself.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure, yeah, the core feeling.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
let myself down. I feel like I failed myself. You know, and find feeling words that resonate. It might be, I feel like I betrayed myself.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I feel like I betrayed myself. I feel like I disappointed myself, or I am disappointed in myself. I feel guilt. Yeah, I mean, there is a cocktail of feelings of, you know, kind of the opposite of achievement, of, you know, coming up short of achievement sort of feelings. And again, I’m fleshing it out, because we’re on a podcast. Yeah, go. Yeah. Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah, no, that’s fine. That’s fine. I’m just going to always try and go to the essence of the feeling dynamic, right? Like I said, betrayal or I squandered my potential, you know.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes. Man, this is actually a challenge, because I don’t know that I have put a pin on what the actual feeling is, because, again, Squandered… Squandered’s not far from it. I betrayed myself. That one gives me a little kind of a thing in my throat. Yeah. Betrayed myself.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. And, yeah, and see, and betrayed. So this is good. We’re honing in on the dynamic and seeing you at a certain level. And I don’t mean this, you know, with any kind of arrogance because it’s just reality. The bio-motive framework brings a level of conceptual resolution to the emotional system that I don’t know anyone else has. So you’ve done a lot of work. like this, but the emotional system speaks and resonates through these core feelings and these interpersonal feelings. And so until you’ve done that work, can, it’s not surprising that it’s not completely resolved. You’ve clearly resolved a lot of it and made peace with it, but there’s still this like little crack in your system that hurts.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes. Yeah, and that I jump over that little crack through all of these fleshing outs, right? Huh.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yes. Yes. Yeah. And you can use mindfulness and other things to rationality to stay away from it, but there’s still a sense of betrayal or squandering or not living up to your potential. And, you know, that poor young Josh that could have become so much more. And he threw it all away.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That… that is… that hits at it. And all of the, you know, striving that I do to, you know, I’ve got 30 minutes, so I need to hit golf balls, and my son comes running out, and he says, I want to do this, this, this. Don’t hit golf balls. I want to do this. So then I feel my… I feel myself… I feel… that he’s adding to the betrayal, right? And he’s, you know, he’s here because of the decisions I made back then, because I betrayed… it’s almost like my son is here now because I betrayed myself, right? I can… I link those things without even noticing that I’m linking them. So now my relationship with my son is… is suffering in a way, because I haven’t… I… I still feel like I betrayed myself on some level. Yeah, so all of the things that I interact with are… you know, every time I show up and shoot an 81 where I would have… you know, back then that would have been inconceivably high of a score for me. So every time I do that, it’s a knock. It’s a dredging up of my betrayal of myself. Right? So yeah, that’s a…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So it’s like I abandoned, you know, my quest to create a different reality that I haven’t fully embraced.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes, yes, because I’m still, I still, I was just writing about this in a journal yesterday. You can maybe see the journal right over my shoulder here. In this chair back behind me, I was writing how I’m always wishing things were different. I’m always, I can’t wait till, you know, my business runs itself so I have more time. I can’t wait till my son grows up so he doesn’t…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Hahaha
**Josh Nichols**
You know, I don’t have to, he doesn’t need me like.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
You’ve got a results oriented process, not a process oriented process, which I’ve heard you talk about.
**Josh Nichols**
Exactly, right? Right. So I need all of these things to go right so that I can just get back to my thing. So all of these things are band-aids and cover-ups of rather than like covering up embracing current reality and how beautiful my current reality is.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah, you have a beautiful reality and yet there’s something doesn’t quite feel right about it because it also represents where you got to when you abandoned or betrayed yourself.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes. Everything around me is a result of my self-betrayal, right? So there’s… yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. And let’s check out, do you feel like you betrayed yourself or you abandoned yourself? I feel like I abandoned, you know, the dreams of the young Josh.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, that’s betrayal or abandoned. Betrayed or abandoned. That’s a good one. Yeah, I think betrayal is still there. Abandon? okay, so I did. I kind of ran away from the game in a way. I didn’t like who it was making me at the time, and you know, my then-girlfriend, who’s now my wife, came into my life and brought this whole new, okay, golf’s not the only thing. So I realized, okay, I like her a lot. And I still like golf, of course, but I, this is where I actually need to go, right? I need to get serious with life. need to, you know, grow up basically, right? All I’m doing is playing golf. I’m not even making money doing it. I need to put this childish thing down and actually pursue life like everyone else. like you’re supposed to, right? And that’s harsh language, but yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Well, no, that’s, that’s beautiful because that implies a betrayal as opposed to an abandonment. And it harkens back to a traditional worldview where there’s a certain role and expectation that others have of you, right? That use you finally cracked and submitted to it. So you betrayed your passion to come into alignment with what other people thought.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah, I… absolutely. And, you know, there was a crossover period where it was kind of… I kind of resembled the Scottie Scheffler thing that he was talking about, where, you know, my girlfriend came into my life and now I have… now golf doesn’t mean everything to me. And I was able to let go of golf, let go of results, and it helped me play much, much better. And so my results-oriented view of golf dissipated, and then it became more, I just love the game. I’m just playing the game because I love it. And I also love her, so I have that in my life. And there’s this beautiful richness to life now that wasn’t there before. So there was a period of time where this was great, but then it… took over, think, where it’s now, okay, what is… I started questioning why do I even play golf, right? This is pointless. I took it to an extreme. took the golf is not the only thing to an extreme, so I let it go.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Thank
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right. So you’re literally trying to find a balance between the two visions that you have, you know, me as a great golfer and me as a husband and provider and, you know, love loving family member. Right. And so. Yeah, yeah. And, know, you you need to take that sort of immature vision of the young Josh, where you feel like you betrayed him or abandoned him, left him behind.
**Josh Nichols**
Right. Right. So I’m, I’m in tension. All the time.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
and this mature adult husband and father and find a way for them to both work where they’re fulfilling to you, realizing that you’ve lost five or 10 years of your training career, but like you’re still young and fit. So does that mean you’ve lost it all? And maybe your edge in the mental game can compensate for what you’ve lost in physical flexibility. And you might not have lost any of that yet, right? Just the time really. So right now you can feel, you’ve talked about that you’re doing this compulsively because you haven’t made peace with something. And that’s where I would continue penetrating. Now we’ve worked with the sense of betrayal and that’s an interpersonal feeling. There’s feelings underneath there called core feelings.
**Josh Nichols**
Even deeper.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
yes, yeah, and that’s where the tears usually start. And I don’t know if we want to do that here on this context.
**Josh Nichols**
Maybe next time, maybe part two. List some of them.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Or, yeah. There’s nine. There’s nine core feelings. So we can just go through them then. And so when you think about having betrayed yourself, I feel alone. I feel insignificant. I feel inadequate. I feel worthless. I feel helpless. you’ll lose. I like a bad person or a bad golfer.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
a deep sense of loss or emptiness and I feel hopeless. Now I’m seeing you nod. Normally I don’t do this without the person repeating it out loud because when you say it out loud you bypass some repressive mechanisms and intellectualization and your body has the opportunity to experience it more fully but of the words that I said which ones kind of resonated?
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
What were the first two or three?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I feel insignificant. I feel alone. I feel insignificant. I feel inadequate.
**Josh Nichols**
Alone, I feel alone, is one. And that’s one that I’ve talked with my counselor a lot about, because golf was a very solo process. And now I’m kind of this solo person in this world that I’ve created around myself. I still feel like I’m… Everything out there is battling for my attention, and I’m just trying to do the things that I can do to get where I want to get. So even among people, among other people, I feel alone. And how this relates to my… the betrayal feeling… I don’t know, what do you think?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Well, I need to explore this feeling of aloneness more. Is it because you’re living in such a different world from the other people around you or from the world that you really want to be living in?
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
I think it’s maybe a desire for a future outcome that differs from… you know, my kind of vision is, you know, I’m not working that much. I’ve got all the time in the world to play golf, to spend time with family, but I want to play a lot of golf, right? That’s my kind of vision for myself. But that might not perfectly align with my wife’s.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
you
**Josh Nichols**
vision, or my son’s vision, right? So I’m alone maybe in that vision.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right, right. The vision I have for success will alienate me from my family and make me feel alone, like I know I ought to live alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes. Yes.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So why don’t you say that the vision I have for success will alienate me.
**Josh Nichols**
vision I have for success will alienate me from my fam. Yeah, that resonates.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
and I’m going to be alone in the world again.
**Josh Nichols**
I’m going to be alone in the world again. Yeah, yeah that. I smile when I start to get emotional. Yeah, that’s, that is a scary proposition. That’s a scary feeling that is young Josh again, who was alone for his all sorts of different reasons. But yeah, that’s like a, no no no no, I can’t. I won’t. won’t make decisions that will lead me there, right? If I… if I… everything, every step of the way needs to avoid that potential outcome. So now I’m at tension with my own vision of myself, and at tension with the people blocking me from my vision.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah, yeah, basically you’re saying, you know, if I fully embrace my vision for Gaul, I’m going to be alone in
**Josh Nichols**
If I fully embrace my vision for golf, I’m going to be alone in the world again. Yeah. Because that’s what golf made me before. It made me alone. And I have this desire to just be on the range by myself for hours and hours and hours and hours. So there on the one hand is like this beautiful therapeutic self care. thing that I love to do that fills me up, that adds to me and my enjoyment of life. But it’s also, I’m alone, right? I’m around no one else. it, yeah, it’s like it goes towards my vision while also away from…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And did you enjoy being alone as a golf?
**Josh Nichols**
Yes and no.
**Josh Nichols**
Yes, because it was a achievement, pursuit, of result, like self-realization, self-improvement journey, right? This is me, and I’m just trying to improve myself. I enjoyed being alone as a golfer, but I also… I enjoyed being alone as a golfer, but I did not enjoy being alone as a person outside of golf.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah, and so there’s, this is interesting. So there’s definitely an association that if I re-embrace my passion for golf, I’m going…
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, I’ll get what I want to be alone with golf, but I will also alienate myself from the world, and I’ll do other things poorly.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So if I play this back as in, I want you to see what it sounds like, whether it feels true. The only way I can succeed in golf is by isolating myself and being alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, the only way I will succeed in golf is to isolate myself and be alone in the world again Yeah, and that’s a hopeless feeling, because then it’s…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So I feel hopeless when I say that.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, because I mean that’s that’s kind of worldview crumbling because it’s like I had this this is what I’ll this is what I want right I want to I want to play golf but maybe I’ve never realized the. the buttons that that would push. And the reason why I’m doing it is to be alone, but the result of that isolation would be awful too. So this is, it’s a complicated… it’s like a…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. Yeah. Like these, these feeling beliefs are much more nuanced than I normally work with, but that just because you’ve done so much work on that, right? But, but listen to the statement. The only way for me to succeed in golf is to isolate myself and be all alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure, sure, yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm. Yeah, I mean I think that’s true and I Again that
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
The only way I can succeed in golf is to isolate myself and be all alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. It,
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, that’s like a dark, hopeless, hopelessness.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
I’m going to just, because we’re not in an actual session, I’m going to just do a little bit more playing around. But I imagine Scottie Scheffler feels the same way. The only way I’ve succeeded in golf is by isolating myself and being all alone in the world.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah. Right?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Does he? Does he?
**Josh Nichols**
Huh.
**Josh Nichols**
It’s almost like because he chooses to not be isolated from the world, it helps him play better golf. Right? So his way of succeeding in golf is to not be isolated. What do you think?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Well, I don’t know, but what I’ve heard him say is, get up in the morning and I go to work. My wife kisses me and says, thank you for going to work like this. And then he comes back and he’s fully with his family.
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Josh Nichols**
He has to isolate.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Well, but you see, when he’s at home with his family, he’s fully home with his family. He’s not dreaming about, yearning about going off to put more time on the course, which means he’s present and there and enjoying that world. When he leaves to go to work, he’s in the golf world, he’s alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Mm-hmm. Huh.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
But he’s happy with that because that’s what people do. People have to leave their families to go to work. There’s no extra sacrifice there.
**Josh Nichols**
Mm-hmm. Mm.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right?
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah. So-
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
So you have a feeling, Bleak Sisters, the only way I can succeed in golf is to isolate myself and be all alone.
**Josh Nichols**
Right. Huh. Yeah, that is a convoluted view of what golf is to me. And it’s a view that doesn’t have to exist.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right, because you could literally just say, okay honey, I’m going to work. Go to work, do your isolated golf and revel in it and focus on it. And then come home and spend time with your family and be fully present with your family, not yearning to be on the golf course because you’ve already put your time in the golf.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And you might even be able to do that wonderful thing that people do where they bring their kids to the golf course and they golf with their kids and, you know, train them to be great golfers and give them that edge and have both worlds kind of start uniting while you’re getting good practice and play.
**Josh Nichols**
Sure.
**Josh Nichols**
Hmm. Right, so this core belief feeling that we’ve unearthed is the purpose that we look at that, and the purpose for the listener to drill down, and ideally with the help of someone else, but to drill down that far, it’s to see the…
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
It’s a distortion.
**Josh Nichols**
Right, it doesn’t need to be this way. Right, you’ve come to believe this, and it’s causing you suffering, and you don’t have to believe this. So you don’t have to suffer.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yes, yes. Right, and so we’ve sort of found the core feeling beliefs and interpersonal betrayal and loneliness, right? And this is more complicated than most people can ever hold, and it sort of reflects a traditional worldview, which is black and white thinking, one or the other. Whereas postmodern is like many perspectives, many views, they’re not…
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
necessarily mutually exclusive.
**Josh Nichols**
Right. Yeah. Huh. Okay. Well, as much as I would love to keep going, and I feel like I say this more and more at the end of every podcast episode. One, I don’t know if we ever truly started this episode, but we just started talking. But I have so many things that I want to talk to you about, so we have to put a pen in these and do these again another time. Thank you, Doc. This was good.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
great. And I didn’t want to say that I’ve got my blog, that I’m going to be a three part series on worldviews in golf. And I’m trying to be less academic and, you know, because I love ideas, right? And the, you know, I’m trying to try to make them relatable. And so I’ve taken each of the worldviews and making an archetype, like, you know, the the dominator, the rulemaker.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, clearly.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
the Zen guy, the achievement, the data tech guy. So they all represent worldviews. And so I’m going to put that out. And I’ve also got an assessment that I’ll be putting together so that you can take the assessment and get a sense of which worldviews are dominant and which ones are sort of emerging. hopefully that will help people start waking up, disidentifying from some of what we’re enmeshed in. Because worldviews are hard to see, right? You have to…
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
start even being told that there’s such a thing as worldviews before you can start naming your own. And then, you know, our emotional conditioning tends to keep us embedded in some of them when we’ve kind of grown out of them. We keep pieces of them with us even when you don’t need to. So I’m just hoping that all of this work that I’ve done in the spiritual meditation and, you know, other worlds will translate into golf nicely. I’m my first prototype. And if people want to work with me individually, you know,
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
that’s going to be possible and I’m probably going put some group programs together depending on the interest and stuff.
**Josh Nichols**
Very nice. Yeah. And I’ve read, I’ve read the, the, guess probably finished product at this point, but I’ve read the first of the three-part series of your blog and it’s awesome. It’s a lot of the things we talked about today are theories and, and concepts that this podcast has never been exposed to, which is amazing. I love it. But how we kind of ended this podcast where it was, kind of grounded and applied, that’s what your blog post did. It’s like, here’s a really big concept that you’ve probably never heard of, but here’s where you have seen examples of this thing and manifestations of this concept. So let’s put these together and see ourselves in it. So that it’s really fascinating. I’ll have links in the show notes to the, to the blog. Yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
And applied, yeah.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yeah. And one of the reasons why I’m bringing the worldviews up is that the emotional reactions we have all take place within the worldview. And so you can have the same experience. You bring about totally different emotional reactions depending on the worldview that you’re in. Right. And so that’s a really good place to sort of wake up to and then
**Josh Nichols**
Right.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Once you know that the world view is affecting your emotional reactions, you can sort of look to see where the emotional reactions are reflecting your accidental condition to history and made you sensitive to certain areas and do that work as well.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah. Yeah. I always think of it as like wearing glasses of different shades, right? You don’t even realize that you’re seeing the world in red until you take them off and realize that’s not actually how my eyes have to see the world, right?
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Yes.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
Right? That’s exactly what it’s like to wake up from a worldview that you’ve been embedded in forever.
**Josh Nichols**
Yeah, boy, it’s fascinating. All right, Dr. Doug, this is deeply helpful to me, and I hope it was helpful to the listener. So thank you. Again, I’ll have links to stuff in the show notes, but Dr. Doug, thank you so much. This was a pleasure.
**Dr Douglas Tataryn**
It really was a pleasure. Thank you so much for hosting me and I look forward to more interactions with you here, possibly and in the book club. I’m really enjoying the book club.
**Josh Nichols**
Mmm. Awesome. Alright, doc. Thanks, man.
